Book Review Leonard, Lori (2016) Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Lori Leonard’s Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad draws upon more than ten years of research in three communities in Chad’s southern Doba Basin to elucidate some of the tensions, transformations and contestations that emerged as people responded to the implementation of the policies and standards of this oil-as-development ‘model’. Through a cohesive and well-researched examination, Leonard identifies several areas of tension between the claims and documentational policies of the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project and their contestations on the ground. This pipeline is not a ‘classic case of enclave extraction’ (Ferguson, 2005), she asserts, but rather an attempt by an oil consortium made up of corporations skilled in global governance, ‘proactive’ in adopting Corporate Social Responsibility (p. 9; although this declaration of CSR as ‘proactive’ seems presumptive and ahistorical) and working to reduce or eliminate any oil-related ‘footprint’ from the region (as a mechanism to reduce ‘friction’ with local communities, which might trigger unrest; see Appel, 2012). Despite attempts to render the pipeline invisible (Barry, 2013), the project was deeply entangled in people’s lives, albeit not in ways anticipated by the project’s engineers and anthropologists. Following recent anthropological and geographical scholarship in the extractive industries, the focus of the book is on the relations and frictions that are fashioned between human-material inter- actions as well as the affect of objects—be this the ‘dead letters’ written to the consortium regarding reimbursements or the consortium’s things, both cast-off (‘waste’) or stolen (‘property’) things. Leonard’s reading shows that there is little cohesion between the consortium’s policies and their resulting effects and affects on/in people’s lives. Rather, unexpected and novel subjectivies and relations emerge from consortium policies and programming. Against the reading that would posit the area as void of state interaction, Leonard shows that aspects of the pipeline governance, for example the compensation and grievance mecha- nisms, functioned as modes of administration, domesticated action, created new expectations for village chiefs, and compelled new categorizations of people. The consortium’s implementation of a comprehensive land-use map compelled even those people living outside of the reach of the pipeline to engage in their own land mapping activities. As people walked and staked the boundaries of their land in ways that mimicked those required by the consortium, they voluntarily enacted an auxiliary privati- zation of land in the region (see Murray Li, 2014 for a similar analysis of Land’s End). Although the letters written to the consortium go unanswered (and, thus, are ‘dead’ or seem to do nothing) they nonetheless have important functions and do work to produce new ideas and subjectivities. The writing of letters, Leonard reasons, functioned to ‘domesticate disputes’ by ‘requir[ing] people to frame their complaints narrowly’ as well as by sequestering villages into individual spaces to be managed (p. 23). The acts surrounding the writing of letters—the getting together with neighbours, friends and family to speak of the compensation mechanisms, the acquisition and subsequent normalization of the consortium’s language of assessment and value, the restriction of action to individuals writing letters, the angered interactions with the community liaisons, etc.—she argues, served to ‘write the project into life’ (p. 23, italics original). Even those actors critical of the project (such as NGO employees and activists) further solidified the consortium’s valuation system by pressing people to articulate claims within the consortium’s rubrics of what was real, measurable, just and fair. These letters are different than Barry’s (2013) reading of the complaints along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, where he viewed this sort of documentation as occasions for claims- and rights-making. Rather, the writing of letters here restricted peoples’ responses to pipeline-related grievances to the level of the individual. This restriction in scale was similar to the processes of community consultation, which were also ‘small, informal gatherings that were organized, one village at a time’. By restricting the consortium’s exchanges with communities to the smallest scales, the consortium reduced the gathering of crowds, while ‘manag[ing] and contain[ing] the anger and dissent expressed at these events, [thus] prevent[ing] disaffection from escalating and spiralling out of control’ (p. 50). One of the most important contributions of the book is the powerfully articulated argument that the World Bank and its oversight agencies failed utterly and completely to consider the presumed and naturalized corporate efficiency in their projecting of the blame (for the projects failure to effect development) onto the government of Chad. Built into the narrative of the failure of the government to ensure project revenues, was an acknowledgement of what became known as the ‘two-speed problem’. The term refers to the fast speed of corporate engineering and construction alongside the relatively slower speed of State drafting and implementation of mechanisms for poverty reduction. This meant that oil was being extracted before the State had implemented proper oversight mechanisms. Leonard identifies a key weakness in this ‘two-speed’ hyphotesis, however: . . . in its ongoing commentary on the two-speed regime, the [World Bank’s International Advisory Group] never shifted its focus from the government to the consortium or asked how the consortium was able to work with such ease and speedÁ Á ÁCorporate efficiency and the fact that oil revenues accrued “much sooner . . . than anticipated” was the product of work, including efforts the consortium made to separate itself from the farmers. (p. 113) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.03.003 2214-790X/ The Extractive Industries and Society xxx (2016) xxx–xxx G Model EXIS 308 No. of Pages 2 Please cite this article in press as: A. Murrey, , Extr. Ind. Soc. (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.03.003 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The Extractive Industries and Society journal homepage: www.else vie r.com/locat e/e xis